I believe it was Jesse Jackson whom I first heard describing generational poverty as “frozen violence.” Herman Hess also described “frozen violence” very well when he wrote, “We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing.”Perhaps Hess overstated the case a bit but I take his point to be that sometimes the worst violence is institutionalized and therefore invisible to those who live higher up on the food chain. Every hierarchy can be thought of as frozen violence whether that hierarchy is racial, economic or gender based:The movement to interfere in the reproductive decisions of women is violent when it threatens people with prison even if it calls itself “right to life.” For police to be used to protect protect the structures of economic injustice is violence even if it is called “keeping the peace.”When marriage is withheld from same gender couples, when Christian family values makes no safe space for people who live outside its own moralisms, they are not expressing Christian piety but religious violence. Mark Twain bluntly called out the white Christian Church for its role in defending the structures of slavery. Twain said, “There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one – the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession – at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all.”The desire to dominate others is a chameleon that can easily pose as patriotism, morality or evangelism. This is a chaotic time when religious people must choose between being popular cheerleaders for the remaining structures of frozen violence or prophetic voices calling humankind from hierarchies of violence to a new dawn where no one must live under the heel of another. And each of us must decide whether we will place our trust in the power that would dominate our human family, or the power that would liberate it.